Money can also be carried in paper form and on small plastic cards. If Apple want retailers to invest in an alternative payment infrastructure, especially one isolated from other mobile OS methods, then they'll need to prove one hell of a value add, not least including a willingness from consumers to use it.

Apple has singlehandedly steered the UX direction of the entire technology industry for the past 30 years. I’m pretty sure that if they have a new payment system they want to invent that it will be adopted.

Then again, the world sure seems to be enamored with its PS/2 and SCSI ports...

Your desire for a thick iPhone is misplaced. That would spell bad news for Apple. Unlike you, I have faith in Tim Cook.

Thick phone? What are you talking about? You consider the imperceptible difference of one mm (less than a 25th inch) to make a phone thick?

We're back to the concept that Apple, no matter who's running it, is always right. Disabuse yourself of that notion. And, by the way, we don't know if Cook gives any input on these things, as he's said, publicly, that he's not a product guy.

That's not how I read his statement at all. He wrote a very simple sentence, anticipating the worry trolls that always infest a subject like this, stating the simple truth: Apple obviously know what they're doing and will create what they feel is the best phone possible overall. He didn't shut down the debate, but left it open.

Give him some credit; he's not a drive-by troll.

You know, you're still new here, and don't know the relationships. Look at how long we've been here. We know each other, and know what to say to each other. Don't make assumptions.

Why is everybody so adamant that having NFC will be a bad idea? Or that iBeacons are sufficient? Maybe you guys should think outside the narrow American box you live in and realize that NFC is used all over the world, especially where I live in Japan. I think that if true this will be great and open the door for a new type of mobile payment, even in the US. And Apple will be at the forefront, because let's face it, no one can do something like this but them. Every other phone maker has tried and it's failed (at least in the US).

Since NFC is failing everywhere, it's not just a narrow American box. And it's never caught on here at all. Even the Japanese have been using it much less.

Because getting every merchant on the planet to install a new payment device is both daunting and unlikely when what they already have works well and is supported by every bank in the world.

That's why NFC isn't doing well. It requires terminals that cost several thousand dollars each. Retailers have been reluctant to buy and install them. But other methods work just as well, or better. Apple uses WiFi in their own stores to allow purchases to be made without any sales assistance at all. You don't need to swipe at a terminal. Just do it right where the product is, and walk out the store. If you need a bag, then you can ask for one. Much better than NFC.

That's not how I read his statement at all. He wrote a very simple sentence, anticipating the worry trolls that always infest a subject like this, stating the simple truth: Apple obviously know what they're doing and will create what they feel is the best phone possible overall. He didn't shut down the debate, but left it open.

Give him some credit; he's not a drive-by troll.

No. But you felt the need to pretty much quote everybody who disagreed with Apple.

The problem with the statement that Apple knows best is that it is unfalsifiable. If Apple were to release a 4Gb RAM phone you would also be correct. It also tries to thwart debate. Treats people like children.

Everybody here who thinks 1GB is not enough is a consumer. They know their own experiences. What Apple thinks it knows, or how it balances costs vs expectations, will remain a mystery. However if someone thinks that 1G is not enough for him. It isn't. Apple may sacrifice RAM for cost or increased battery life but it still will have the problem of not satisfying all it's consumers.

All the stranger because the 64 bit architecture can handle vastly more RAM than a 32 bit architecture and yet by the time Apple gets to expand its memory options Android devices will have caught up.

According to a recent report by Australian bank Westpac, contactless payments via mobile will reach A$3 billion in Australia by 2015. In Australia, mobile-based contactless payments have accounted for 60% of all debit-card transactions in the past 12 months. The growth can be attributed to the proliferation of smartphones that come with features, such as NFC, that make it possible to perform contactless payments.

Contactless payments are getting much bigger in the UK too; I think probably the majority of debit and credit cards are now contactless, and the touch points are integrated in a lot of POS chip and PIN machines in all sorts of retail places.

Plus, in London at least, the entire public transport network is run on NFC technology, which has now also been expanded so instead of being a special card, now works with contactless debit and credit cards.

I'm not sure what the measure of a failure is in this area, but I'm not seeing it.

lilgto64 mentioned a paging file. This to me seems the most logical. Neither iOS or Android use a paging file which is why you run into memory limits (and why Apps get suspended and closed when memory is low).

Paging files back in the days of hard disk drives sucked because of the speed compared to memory. Running Windows on a system with low memory was horribly slow. I'm sure we all remember the light for your hard drive blinking madly as Windows was constantly paging stuff to disk. This is the main reason people upgraded their RAM.

Now with Flash storage paging files are far more practical on systems with lower RAM.

Ugh no. Flash storage, you turn paging off entirely, because you don't want to burn out the NAND within a couple of hours. It's the same reason you don't defragment a drive that uses NAND. You just quickly burn out the 10,000 write cycles. When the write cycles end, the entire chip becomes unusable, unable to read or write.

A far more likely scenario is that there is no need to keep things in RAM when they can just be read from the NAND flash again. In a desktop, you read from the drive and then keep the program in ram perpetually until closed. In iOS, are far more likely scenario is that the program could ALWAYS read from NAND flash when switched to, and since the average program on iOS is MB's not GB's this is entirely doable. The program state is likely what's in RAM. However this departs greatly from OS X, so I don't think they would be doing this unless all Mac's had SSD's to begin with.

I dunno. I just got back from the mall, where I made three of my four purchases with a tap of my debit card. Only one merchant required that I insert it. I think NFC is actually catching on quite well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by melgross

But other methods work just as well, or better. Apple uses WiFi in their own stores to allow purchases to be made without any sales assistance at all. You don't need to swipe at a terminal. Just do it right where the product is, and walk out the store. If you need a bag, then you can ask for one. Much better than NFC.

You won't get any argument from me on the superiority of the Apple Retail Store approach to payment. It's amazing and awesome. I wonder, though, if such a system could be readily installed relatively universally in other establishments?

Apple controls the entire POS system in their own stores. Any new payment system will have to easily integrate with existing POS systems over which Apple won't have control. Same with inventory management systems. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but just that it seems like such a herculean task, almost equivalent to becoming an end-to-end inventory and POS system provider as well as an international bank, that it doesn't seem realistic.

Because it’s unnecessary? Same reason a 50 megapixel camera is a bad idea.

I don’t see how that matters. PS/2 was used all over the world before Apple destroyed it with USB.

Exactly, so why should Apple be beholden to the limitations of existing technologies in this area?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lorin Schultz

Because getting every merchant on the planet to install a new payment device is both daunting and unlikely when what they already have works well and is supported by every bank in the world.

^^This. Merchants that have NFC-type payments want to use what is already established. New merchants can use a "newer" system if they want to. If we see NFC this time around, I expect Apple to have contigency plans for both NFC and a new Bluetooth LE based solution as well. Which I think is the smart thing to do! I am just sayng Tallest Skil, do not write off NFC because you personally do not have a want/need for it. Many of us do!!

According to a recent report by Australian bank Westpac, contactless payments via mobile will reach A$3 billion in Australia by 2015. In Australia, mobile-based contactless payments have accounted for 60% of all debit-card transactions in the past 12 months. The growth can be attributed to the proliferation of smartphones that come with features, such as NFC, that make it possible to perform contactless payments.

Australia huh? All 21 million of them? Well, it hasn't caught on here for all 330 million of us. And it was never as popular in the EU as was sometimes reported. It's undergoing a slow death in the place where it was the most popular, Japan.

Those are the big markets that really matter. If phones with NFC don't prove popular there, then what will happen to the small markets? Eventually, manufacturers might decide to save the expense, and discontinue the chips.

We hear of NFC for the iPhone 6, as we have for the last two models. I don't see why. Just a short time until we find out.

There's NFC and there's NFC. Yes, the London Underground and busses use NFC. You get an Oyster card for long term use, or buy cards for short term use. But that's different from using your phone everywhere. Major transport systems cost so much that the cost of these terminals are just part of it, and it helps the flow. But commercial establishments must show a profit, and terminals that cost thousands may not fit into that. Large stores with several dozen registers may see that expense as way too high. Small stores may also see it as too expensive, especially as they will need to maintain, and man, standard registers for the foreseeable furure. Where's the savings?

I dunno. I just got back from the mall, where I made three of my four purchases with a tap of my debit card. Only one merchant required that I insert it. I think NFC is actually catching on quite well.

You won't get any argument from me on the superiority of the Apple Retail Store approach to payment. It's amazing and awesome. I wonder, though, if such a system could be readily installed relatively universally in other establishments?

Apple controls the entire POS system in their own stores. Any new payment system will have to easily integrate with existing POS systems over which Apple won't have control. Same with inventory management systems. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but just that it seems like such a herculean task, almost equivalent to becoming an end-to-end inventory and POS system provider as well as an international bank, that it doesn't seem realistic.

First if all, you're talking about a debit card. Try that with an Android phone equipped with NFC, as many are now, and it won't work.

There's NFC and there's NFC. Yes, the London Underground and busses use NFC. You get an Oyster card for long term use, or buy cards for short term use. But that's different from using your phone everywhere. Major transport systems cost so much that the cost of these terminals are just part of it, and it helps the flow. But commercial establishments must show a profit, and terminals that cost thousands may not fit into that. Large stores with several dozen registers may see that expense as way too high. Small stores may also see it as too expensive, especially as they will need to maintain, and man, standard registers for the foreseeable furure. Where's the savings?

I was arguing for NFC in the phone rather than a proprietary Apple alternative for precisely that reason. The benefit to retailers for allowing people to pay with their iPhone is unlikely to be enough to prompt the investment in additional payment tacking technology unless Apple do a stupendous job in keeping costs down and advertising value add.

Meanwhile, it seems like the contactless payments are being integrated into PDQ machines as standard now in the UK, so retailers are getting it when they replace their terminals. If nothing else changes then eventually they'll all have it.

And you can use contactless debit cards and credits cards instead of Oyster now. It's totally conceivable that this could be integrated into a phone without needing any hardware changes at the barrier.

I was arguing for NFC in the phone rather than a proprietary Apple alternative for precisely that reason. The benefit to retailers for allowing people to pay with their iPhone is unlikely to be enough to prompt the investment in additional payment tacking technology unless Apple do a stupendous job in keeping costs down and advertising value add.

Meanwhile, it seems like the contactless payments are being integrated into PDQ machines as standard now in the UK, so retailers are getting it when they replace their terminals. If nothing else changes then eventually they'll all have it.

And you can use contactless debit cards and credits cards instead of Oyster now. It's totally conceivable that this could be integrated into a phone without needing any hardware changes at the barrier.

If you read the commercial computer publications and financial publications online, you will get a different answer. The iPhone is 43% of smartphone marketshare here, and rising. iOS users spend a lot more with their phones and tablets than do Android users, and are more likely to use apps that enable payment. This is documented. There have been many articles about this saying that the industry is waiting to see what Apple will do, and until then, they are holding off.

We see the big credit card companies are working on their own version of the software and encryption, along with some of the banks, but there is a big split between them as to what they actually want, and it's way behind schedule.

Google's Wallet has been a failure so far, and Google knows it. Earlier this year they modified it to also use Apple's iBeacon technology.

The UK has a bunch of differing standards, and they're always modifying them. I'd be willing to bet that if Apple did come out with NFC, and it began to catch on here, other countries would, at some point, begin adopting it. iOS users have too much buying power to ignore, and they're willing to use it with Apple devices and software in preference to other standards

In preference to credit and debit cards though? And is it a strong enough preference that retailers would make the investment in new transaction infrastructure? Especially when the vanguard of forward-thinking technology retailers have probably already invested in contactless recently?

That's the sort of question that Apple are probably mulling over, and unless their (unknown, possibly non-existent) proprietary, non-NFC solution is so good that it can confidently challenge those barriers, then they'd be wise to consider adopt existing technologies that have traction, like contactless. There are tens of millions of contactless credit and debit cards out there, tens of thousands of terminals in use (and I'm just talking about the UK), and they're working easily alongside legacy payment methods. Turning down that kind of deployment advantage would be a major opportunity cost of any alternative.

In preference to credit and debit cards though? And is it a strong enough preference that retailers would make the investment in new transaction infrastructure? Especially when the vanguard of forward-thinking technology retailers have probably already invested in contactless recently?

That's the sort of question that Apple are probably mulling over, and unless their (unknown, possibly non-existent) proprietary, non-NFC solution is so good that it can confidently challenge those barriers, then they'd be wise to consider adopt existing technologies that have traction, like contactless. There are tens of millions of contactless credit and debit cards out there, tens of thousands of terminals in use (and I'm just talking about the UK), and they're working easily alongside legacy payment methods. Turning down that kind of deployment advantage would be a major opportunity cost of any alternative.

There were tens of millions of not-so-smart smartphones in the UK before the iPhone arrived; it counted for nothing.

If Apple decide to do mobile payments, it will transform them. They're never going to adopt existing technologies unless they can revolutionise them. In its current incarnation, NFC is not Apple-quality. If Apple use NFC, it will be an improved NFC that doesn't currently exist.

"If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth."- African proverb